This post reminded me of another great post that delves more deeply into the S-curve phenomenon, Invisible Asymptotes. It’s written by someone who was involved with Amazon in their early days, as they found their growth slowing and needed to predict what was the next bottleneck to their growth as they went through the S curve cycle.
For me, in strategic planning, the question [ was to flush out what I call the invisible asymptote: a ceiling that our growth curve would bump its head against if we continued down our current path. It’s an important concept to understand for many people in a company, whether a CEO, a product person, or, as I was back then, a planner in finance.
Amazon’s invisible asymptote
Fortunately for Amazon, and perhaps critical to much of its growth over the years, perhaps the single most important asymptote was one we identified very early on. Where our growth would flatten if we did not change our path was, in large part, due to this single factor.
We had two ways we were able to flush out this enemy. For people who did shop with us, we had, for some time, a pop-up survey that would appear right after you’d placed your order, at the end of the shopping cart process. It was a single question, asking why you didn’t purchase more often from Amazon. For people who’d never shopped with Amazon, we had a third party firm conduct a market research survey where we’d ask those people why they did not shop from Amazon.
Both converged, without any ambiguity, on one factor. You don’t even need to rewind to that time to remember what that factor is because I suspect it’s the same asymptote governing e-commerce and many other related businesses today.
Shipping fees.
People hate paying for shipping. They despise it. It may sound banal, even self-evident, but understanding that was, I’m convinced, so critical to much of how we unlocked growth at Amazon over the years.
People don’t just hate paying for shipping, they hate it to literally an irrational degree. We know this because our first attempt to address this was to show, in the shopping cart and checkout process, that even after paying shipping, customers were saving money over driving to their local bookstore to buy a book because, at the time, most Amazon customers did not have to pay sales tax. That wasn’t even factoring in the cost of getting to the store, the depreciation costs on the car, and the value of their time.
People didn’t care about this rational math. People, in general, are terrible at valuing their time, perhaps because for most people monetary compensation for one’s time is so detached from the event of spending one’s time. Most time we spend isn’t like deliberate practice, with immediate feedback.
Wealthy people tend to receive a much more direct and immediate payoff for their time which is why they tend to be better about valuing it. This is why the first thing that most ultra-wealthy people I know do upon becoming ultra-wealthy is to hire a driver and start to fly private. For most normal people, the opportunity cost of their time is far more difficult to ascertain moment to moment.
You can’t imagine what a relief it is to have a single overarching obstacle to focus on as a product person. It’s the same for anyone trying to solve a problem. Half the comfort of diets that promise huge weight loss in exchange for cutting out sugar or carbs or whatever is feeling like there’s a really simple solution or answer to a hitherto intractable, multi-dimensional problem.
Solving people’s distaste for paying shipping fees became a multi-year effort at Amazon. Our next crack at this was Super Saver Shipping: if you placed an order of $25 or more of qualified items, which included mostly products in stock at Amazon, you’d receive free standard shipping.
The problem with this program, of course, was that it caused customers to reduce their order frequency, waiting until their orders qualified for the free shipping. In select cases, forcing customers to minimize consumption of your product-service is the right long-term strategy, but this wasn’t one of those.
That brings us to Amazon Prime. This is a good time to point out that shipping physical goods isn’t free. Again, self-evident, but it meant that modeling Amazon Prime could lead to widely diverging financial outcomes depending on what you thought it would do to the demand curve and average order composition.
To his credit, Jeff decided to forego testing and just go for it. It’s not so uncommon in technology to focus on growth to the exclusion of all other things and then solve for monetization in the long run, but it’s easier to do so for a social network than a retail business with real unit economics. The more you sell, the more you lose is not and has never been a sustainable business model (people confuse this for Amazon’s business model all the time, and still do, which ¯\_(ツ)_/¯).
The rest, of course, is history. Or at least near-term history. It turns out that you can have people pre-pay for shipping through a program like Prime and they’re incredibly happy to make the trade. And yes, on some orders, and for some customers, the financial trade may be a lossy one for the business, but on net, the dramatic shift in the demand curve is stunning and game-changing.
The article is quite long (this lengthy excerpt is, like, just the prologue). The post covers a number of interesting areas.
(Overall this blog actually makes me feel the most like reading a Scott Alexander post, i.e. most posts are quite long, covering multiple lenses through which to look at an interesting problem)
This post reminded me of another great post that delves more deeply into the S-curve phenomenon, Invisible Asymptotes. It’s written by someone who was involved with Amazon in their early days, as they found their growth slowing and needed to predict what was the next bottleneck to their growth as they went through the S curve cycle.
The article is quite long (this lengthy excerpt is, like, just the prologue). The post covers a number of interesting areas.
(Overall this blog actually makes me feel the most like reading a Scott Alexander post, i.e. most posts are quite long, covering multiple lenses through which to look at an interesting problem)
I wanted to work in this idea of getting ahead of constraints but it didn’t really seem to fit anywhere.
I agree Eugene is among my top 3 business strategists to follow online and I learned a lot about how to think about strategy by reading his blog.
Idea—a thread for the best blogs to follow on every subject.